Wood Lit - Spring 2007
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In the Land of the Wild Onion: Travels Along Vermont’s Winooski River
The Winooski River runs in a generally northwesterly direction through northern Vermont, connecting, among other towns, Montpelier, the state capitol, with Burlington, the state’s largest city, before emptying into Lake Champlain. The river is some 90 miles (145 kilometers) long and is fed by a watershed of almost 1,100 square miles containing a complex mosaic of woodlands, farms, urban areas, and industries.
This biography of the present river and its basin represents a virtually seamless tapestry of cultural geography, regional history, and environmental science. It is a case history par excellence of the reciprocal influences of human society and the natural environment – the inexorable interactions between “man and nature,” to borrow a 140-year-old phrase from that renowned Vermonter, George Perkins Marsh. Indeed, the author properly stresses here and there the virtual absence of true wilderness and the need for enlightened and dedicated land management to maintain something that approaches a balanced world.
The author grew up in Essex, a town along the river some 10 miles from its mouth, and retains many fond childhood memories of hiking, fishing, and hunting along the river. Now, many years later, he has twice walked and canoed the entire length of the river, faithfully and charmingly recording his current adventures, both aquatic and riparian, at the same time weaving in his childhood reminiscences and much more as well.
It soon becomes evident that this work is the product of a most intelligent, highly educated, and extraordinarily inquisitive mind. The author makes every attempt for the reader to learn all sides of the many river-related policy issues – whether routine, contentious, or intractable – based on his extensive research (using more than 230 published sources) and through the eyes of those many superbly chosen informants upon whom he leans. Although the author’s formal education (culminating in a Princeton Ph.D.) and subsequent academic career were in the humanities, he has in recent years taught himself about earth sciences, wildlife management (both theoretical and practical), civil engineering, and farming (both traditional and organic), all of which are background for his many observations. Among other relevant subjects, we are offered generally first-rate and highly readable primers on geology (both deep and surficial, including glacial action and fluvial geomorphology), stream ecology, hydropower, dairy farming, hunting, trapping, trout fishing, tracking, and Vermont’s aboriginal population. Included is a poignant history of an artisanal sawmill – so that, all told, forest-related activities in the watershed take up more than a quarter of the book.
A substantial number of river and river-basin “biographies” have been published over the years, including a number specifically relevant to Vermont – among them even a prior one on this particular river: Ralph Nading Hill’s 1949 The Winooski: Heartway of Vermont. But none is as erudite, informative, and gracefully written as this one. The author’s contribution is clearly in the tradition of Claudio Magris’s 1989 river basin classic, Danube. To stress once again, what the author captures so magnificently is the complexity and importance of the inescapable interactions between human actions and the natural world – an achievement that suggests to me that this book should be read, enjoyed, and digested by college students and other scholars of ecology, geography, and environmental conservation far beyond the borders of Vermont and New England.
Reviewed by Arthur H. Westing
© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey
Anyone who’s keeps an almanac or “kitchen book” to record nature’s comings and goings in their backyard is following in the footsteps of Aldo Leopold. He said that those who seek to know a piece of land really well “marvel at the spell it casts on us as seasons turn into years.” A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s environmental classic, is a beloved collection of essays on man and nature published in 1949, a year after the Midwestern forester died while helping a neighboring landowner contain a grass fire.
For those new to his writing, Leopold was the original “weekender,” bonding with a worn-out farm by the Wisconsin River, which became his family’s sanctuary as well as a laboratory for ecological restoration and place for personal reflection. These notes from “the Shack,” a chicken coop converted to a cabin for his family, earned him a seat at the table of the world’s leading nature writers. He spent his life pondering “what it might take to establish a new understanding of what land is for.” Julianne Lutz Newton’s new book, Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, chronicles how his career as an American scientist cultivated this “land ethic.”
The trip begins with childhood days hunting and fishing in the heartland, a place of great natural abundance. But Leopold’s Missouri River haunts were on the cusp of huge changes brought by industry and its ripple effects on farming and society. Employed by the U.S. Forest Service, Leopold witnessed damage to the land from poor grazing practices in the West and exploitation of the forests. His life’s work began: how does a moral guide for right use of the land take hold in human beings?
One of my favorite passages of Newton’s book illuminates Leopold’s belief that conservation of precious soil and water might be encouraged through consumer discrimination against what he called “erosion butter” and “devastation milk” produced with unsustainable practices. He believed the practice of forestry was often a destructive force on land when practiced without serious thought to sustainability, an ideal echoed in green marketing efforts today.
Leopold was a gifted leader who set to work on the challenge of instilling an ecological conscience. The restoration work of his farm provided a concrete example for other landowners. Newton’s book is not a biographical record of Leopold’s life. Rather, it shows us how he worked as a forester, student, teacher, and colleague to inspire his fellow scientists.
Each chapter in this book offers plenty of fodder for reflecting on the questions Leopold’s work poses for us today. He hoped that we would learn from our mistakes and develop “ethical behavior not only toward other people but also toward the land itself.” For those who teach and practice conservation, own land, or dream of owning it, Leopold’s gift was to provide simple language to inspire that caring. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey is an important study of how that gift was born.
Reviewed by Karen Rauter
© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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War in the Woods: The Rise of Ecological Forestry in America
My first reaction to the title of this book was to question how a distinguished scholar of conservation history could link “war” with an examination of forestry in America. Sam Hays began his experience in forestry over 60 years ago and has been an eyewitness to the events he has chronicled in several important books, none with such a provocative title. By the end of chapter two, however, it is quite clear that his title choice was right on. Like a reporter embedded in Iraq, he vividly describes the war underway over management of the nation’s forests.
He characterizes the protagonists as “traditional, commodity forestry” versus “ecological forestry.” He carefully describes the concepts and words that define the sharp differences between these camps of old and new forestry, pointing out the divergent vocabulary of each approach. For example, commodity forestry, based in the applied science of silviculture, speaks of stands, board feet, poles, and saw timber, while ecological forestry talks of the forest in terms of habitats, biodiversity, and indicator species, to name just a few of many divergent terms defining the two warring camps.
Hays, however, sees the “war” as much more than just a disagreement over terminology or basic biological science. For the most radical of traditional forest advocates, whom he views as “on the fringe,” ecological forestry is not seen as a debate over legitimate alternatives for forest management but rather as “a threat to traditional American values.” Hays says that as these stanch traditionalists “focused their attacks on the messenger rather than the message” in recent decades, the positions of both sides hardened.
The reaction of the mainstream forest establishment, however, is credited by Hays as launching the “most determined and uncompromising resistance to ecological forestry.” Here he examines the traditional positions of The American Forest and Paper Association, The Society of American Foresters, The National Association of State Foresters, and the various forestry schools, all of which seem unresponsive to public opinion or emerging environmental science. In the final chapter, he concludes that mainstream forestry is “a profession that has become immobilized by its own self-created public isolation.”
Hays also analyzes the more complex position of the U.S. Forest Service, an organization that has tried to be more responsive to changing laws, science, and public opinion, but not without causing tensions between the supervisory line officers and staff, and between foresters and personnel from other professions in the agency. Later in the book, in a chapter titled “The Skirmishes Become a Full-Scale War,” he describes the battle over National Forest planning, policies, and management as a nationwide struggle between traditional commodity forestry and ecological forestry. He decries how the Bush administration “set out to reverse three decades of environmental forest management,” including the Endangered Species Act, The National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clinton National Forest roadless policy. This, Hays asserts, is threatening “the long-standing professional cohesion” of the U.S. Forest Service as the Bush policies intensify conflicting views on forest management within the agency.
In a series of brief case studies, Hays examines the “war” at local, state, and regional levels, with a more in-depth analysis of Pennsylvania. Here he cites the growing influence of grassroots reform organizations, not only relative to local issues but also in shaping national forest policy by their involvement in forest planning and management appeals on individual national forests.
Some in New England may find Hays’s historical perspective on forest policy conflicts overblown, based on our comparatively low-key regional experiences. But few serious readers will be able to ignore his carefully documented analysis. If he’s right, our Yankee tradition of working out differences in forestry without resorting to “war” may be subsumed into the gathering conflict that Hays sees sweeping America.
Reviewed by Carl Reidel
© 2007 by the author; this article may not be copied or reproduced without the author's consent.
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